C.D. Wright in Context
A Contemporaries at Post45 Cluster, Fall 2025Though famously reluctant to claim membership of any single aesthetic school, C. D. Wright’s poetry remains enigmatic for most beyond her immediate circles, and has yet to be clearly situated in the history of American poetry. While gratifying, and aligned with Wright’s singular perspective, the idea that her work resists categorization flattens its sociality and the depth of both her poetics and influence—if there’s a fraught corner of American poetry, Wright’s work engages with it. Work for this cluster explores and engages methods and conditions for understanding Wright’s work as such, or examines aspects of her work’s range of formal and contextual affinities, which is itself a living archive of the tides, trends, and crosscurrents of twentieth and twenty-first century American poetry, from “experimental” marginality to “mainstream” popularity, the regional to the transnational, and the documentary and the narrative lyric, among others. Papers, poems, or creative multimodal responses in this cluster bring into fuller view Wright’s poetry and essays in more detailed context, but also her ongoing significance as a poet, teacher, and touchstone.
Suggested topics from the original CFP included the following, and while many the cluster essays attend to many of these facets of Wright’s work and legacy, there is yet more to consider for future scholarship in dialogue with Wright’s work: documentary poetics, ecopoetics, writers or scholars influenced by her work or teaching, twentieth century American poetry, international readership and reception, contemporary poetry and/or poetic forms (including the long poem, serial poems, or lyric/narrative modes), hybrid forms, regional, rural, or aesthetically-oriented poetry communities, Southern studies, carcerality, antiwar poetry, race, collaborative poetry or artistic practices, intersections of poetry and activism, or small press publishing networks or social engagements with Wright’s work such as reading, teaching, editing, or publishing it.
This site remains online as a source and citation for ongoing projects related to the study of C.D. Wright.
If you have any further questions, please feel free to direct them to Alicia Wright.